Charles Hoskinson: Bitcoin's Quantum Solution is a Hard Fork, Unable to Rescue Satoshi's Coins

Earlier this week, Bitcoin's core developers proposed a plan to freeze 8 million coins to protect against quantum attacks. However, Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson believes this plan is still insufficient to safeguard the network's oldest coins, including Satoshi Nakamoto's holdings. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Hoskinson stated that the proposed defense mechanism is both technically incorrect and fundamentally incapable of protecting the earliest coins. He argued that BIP-361, which aims to phase out quantum-vulnerable bitcoin addresses, is being misrepresented as a soft fork when it would actually require a hard fork due to its impact on existing signature schemes. Hoskinson emphasized that the distinction between a soft fork and a hard fork is crucial, as Bitcoin's development culture has traditionally opposed hard forks due to their potential to compromise the network's immutability. The BIP-361 proposal suggests that users with frozen funds could reclaim them by creating a zero-knowledge proof tied to their BIP-39 seed phrase. Nevertheless, Hoskinson pointed out that this approach would not be able to rescue approximately 1.7 million bitcoins that predate the introduction of BIP-39 in 2013, including the roughly 1 million coins associated with Satoshi's early mining activity. These early coins were generated using a different key derivation method, which relied on a local key pool rather than a deterministic seed, making it impossible for their owners to provide the necessary cryptographic proof to migrate them. Jameson Lopp, the core developer who co-authored BIP-361, has expressed his reservations about the proposal, describing it as a rough idea for a contingency plan rather than a finalized specification. Hoskinson's criticism extends beyond the technical aspects, arguing that Bitcoin's lack of formal on-chain governance hinders the network's ability to resolve tradeoffs through a structured process, leading to contentious upgrades being negotiated through developer mailing lists and social pressure.